Sailing the seas of online marketing and plundering the riches as an affiliate pirate.

Thursday, August 28, 2008

Unauthorized URL modification message from ClickBank

If you are using TinyURL to mask your ClickBank affiliate URLs and suddenly start getting 'Unauthorized URL modification' message (well, actually it says 'Unauthorized URL Modifiction' - oh my god, ClickBank, learn to spell) - that's probably because you are using a browser plugin or some software that causes this to occur. Rest assured, other people will still be properly redirected to the merchant's website through your link, unless they use that software as well. The most common case is using a Firefox plugin called NoScript. If you turn it off temporarily (click the 'S' on your status bar and then 'Allow scripts globablly (dangerous'), you will notice that ClickBank affiliate URLs are once again redirecting properly through TinyURL. Alternatively you can just disable its XSS cross-site sanitizing function (although that will prevent NoScript from protecting you against XSS attacks).

If you want to make absolutely sure that redirects work for everyone, you will be better off using your own website and creating a .php file with a redirect. For example, create a file named affiliate.php and put the following code on it: